Borderlands

Returning to the Borderlands

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Borderlands is one of my favorite game series, second to only the Legend of Zelda series. There’s guns, gnarly explosions, the ability to instantly reduce someone to a red mist and chunks if you do enough damage, stupidly high numbers, an incredible cast of hilarious characters, guns with ridiculous effects, weird missions, plenty of jokes, and some incredibly stirring moments. These games, and the second one in particular, have been responsible for some of the strongest emotions I’ve ever felt as a result of a video game, and they did it all by creating an over-the-top and crazy world with an equally over-the-top and crazy cast that are still entirely real and believable. And they say you can’t really tell an interesting story in a first-person shooter.

Since the second one, Borderlands 2, is my favorite, I’m going to focus on that one. When you start a game these days, you can pick one of six playable characters, each with their own unique back stories, class abilities, and role. Since the game has cooperative play for up to four players, each character tends to fall into one of the roles you find in a typical RPG. Axton, the commando, is the party tank. Maya, the siren, is the party cleric. Zero, the number (assassin), is the rogue. Salvador, the Gunzerker, is the blasty mage. Krieg, the psycho, is the barbarian. Gage, the mechromancer, is the off-tank. Each of the characters has three skill trees that allows you to focus them toward one part of their role over another. Axton, my personal favorite, can focus on hit points, regeneration, and not dying; putting out tons of damage, staying mobile, and tactical damage; or creating a turret that is going to be a huge threat to all of your enemies, thereby diverting their attention away from you.

No matter which character you pick, the story stays pretty much the same, aside from a slight variety in the way the NPCs interact with you and what background information you’re given for your character. Handsome Jack, the owner of mega-corporation Hyperion, wants to dig up a vault and unleash the creature within it upon the planet, removing the bandits and people who live on it in order to turn it into what he considers a more peaceful, happy planet. He’s willing to kill anyone he has to in order to do what he thinks is best, constantly blames the player for forcing his hand, and seems to delight in the violence he gets to personally inflict on the people who defy his tyranny. Your character survives a train wreck and is then recruited by the anti-Hyperion resistance in order to strike back against Handsome Jack in an attempt to gain control of the creature inside the hidden vault first, so you can unleash it upon Hyperion instead.

Needless to say, a lot of crazy stuff happens that severely complicates everything. All the while, as you try to sort out the plot and turn in as many side-quests as you can, you’re collecting guns with crazy effects like shooting in bursts of thirteen that, when shot into a wall, create a low-quality rendition of the oldest cave paintings in the world. Or guns that never run out of ammo, guns that generate their own ammo, guns that explode when you attempt to reload them so that you never have to bother with replacing ammo clips, grenades named after classic D&D spells, and automatic sniper rifles that get more accurate the longer you hold the trigger down. Half the fun of the game is seeing what crazy guns you get and what their crazy effects do and, since the guns are all entirely randomized aside from a few important ones, it is incredibly unlucky that you’ll encounter the same gun twice.

As you move through the missions, gaining levels and collecting loot, you get to unlock new powers and abilities, turning your character into a one-person murder machine whose only weakness is one-shot kill attacks like some of the incredibly powerful enemies have and the fact that you sometimes just run out of bullets. The reason Axton is my favorite is because he not only just gets straight boosts to his damage, he also gets incredible health regeneration. He is my ideal character for a solo game because I don’t need to worry about dying as much and can take my time to line up the head-shots that’ll make each fight a breeze. It is incredibly rewarding to watch the huge numbers pop up as I shoot a bandit or bizarre creature in its weak point. There are ways to get higher numbers with other characters, but that’s contingent on luck and the right combination of guns and abilities.

While some missions can be difficult because of the requirements or that the way the game is designed to accommodate both solo play and cooperative play with your friends, the game is also forgiving. Hit boxes for most enemies and weak points are rather larger than they look and there are ways to bypass any amount of aiming deficiency. Shotguns, for one. Grenades, combat abilities, melee attacks, and stubborn refusal to do anything but work on improving your aim until you can nail a head-shot from across the map also work really well. Your best bet, and the most fun way to experience the game in my opinion, is to play with at least one other friend. The cooperative experience only adds to the game, since it makes it a lot easier to just plow through whatever enemies are blocking your way forward, to a degree. There are usually more enemies as a result of extra players by your side, but a friend can help you get back on your feet if you’ve gone down far more easily than if you need to rely on killing an enemy.

If you don’t mind a little gore on occasion and enjoy first-person shooters, I cannot recommend Borderlands 2 (and the rest of the family) strongly enough. It is incredibly fun and, though the pacing can slow to a crawl at times of heavy side-questing, is never boring. Check it out for the PC (my recommendation) or the re-release put out on PlayStation 4 or Xbox One. You can’t go wrong, no matter how you choose to enjoy it.

This Game Has A Destiny Too Complex To See

Chris 1 Comment

One of the games I’ve been playing a lot recently is Destiny 2 on the PC. It isn’t Borderlands, but it is still a shooter with super interesting guns and special powers you can swap around. That’s close enough for me to enjoy, especially since I can easily get all of my friends to show up on an evening to play some Destiny 2 with me and I’ve yet to actually finish the story of a Borderlands game with anyone but my librarian friend. It may not have the same sense of humor, cell-shaded glory, intriguing characters, smooth control scheme, super supportive community, excellent campaign mode…. Okay, maybe the comparison isn’t as great as I’d originally thought.

That isn’t to say Destiny 2 is bad or that I’m not enjoying it. I actually really enjoy Destiny 2, even the online PvP (Player versus Player) modes. I play it all the time by my own choice, even if I never really play it by myself. The campaign doesn’t have as much replayability, but it is also super easy to just power through if you’re interesting in earning the XP for your clan (a loose association of players that can bring you some minor benefits and is basically just a list of people who’ll do the three-player missions with you) or trying to increase your chances of getting a rare gun. It was a lot of fun to play through the first time, even if it wasn’t super compelling. You can definitely tell that the main focus of the game is supposed to be on what happens AFTER you complete the campaign.

There’s already a lot to do after the campaign ends, and there will only ever be more as new content is created and released. There are Strikes, which are three-player missions that have a good chance of dropping good gear, which come in a couple different flavors. Vanilla (normal) strikes are relatively easy and vary widely, but don’t drop very good gear that often. Heroic strikes are more difficult and drop better gear along with having a chance to drop the best gear. Nightfall strikes are even more difficult and have special rules, but also drop better gear in addition to having the best chance of dropping the rarest gear. There’s the Crucible, which is the main PvP mode, and the Trials of the Nine, which is a special format of the PvP mode that gives you really great gear if you manage to win 7 out of 9 matches. There’s also the Leviathan Raid, which is the highest-tier of end-game content, requires six people, and is the best way to get gear. There’s also a number of things that happen on each world, such as public events that anyone can join, small adventures for alright look, and the constant grind of earning tokens you can trade in to each world’s representative for random loot around (but usually below) your level.

All of this content is geared toward players who enjoy making multiple character, doing weekly or daily grind sessions to get the best possible weapons, gear, cosmetic items, and emotes. There’s some room for more casual players since the best way to get gear to do the weekly milestones, which basically just requires that you just play a little of every game mode every week. You can do it in a couple of hours one night a week if you’ve got a decent group of people to play with, though doing the Raid can easily double that. You can just keep playing with the same character the entire time or switch between a few characters to get the weekly rewards all over again as you help the more casual members of your clan earn their weeklies. Personally, I like to play it whenever there’s someone online to play with but I usually stick to one character because I’m not super motivated by the rare weapons. I just like to “Captain America” things as a Titan (you get a shield you can bash people with, block attacks with, or throw at distance enemies to damage and blind them. It’s so much fun to just run around punching the crap out of enemies in a shooter. And, if you get the right gear, it’s a totally viable strategy.

The sheer variety of play style available to the players is where Destiny 2 shines. There are three very different classes with different styles of play and each of those classes can be played in a number of very different ways based on the special properties of your armor. I have arm armor for my Titan that includes the lunge distance of my melee attacks and the damage the attacks do, which stacks with a class ability that does the same thing. If you set it up right and time everything well, you can fly around a battlefield like superman, punch everything to death. Warlocks do incredible amounts of damage in general but are probably also the biggest utility class since you can modify them to increase damage, heal, use more grenades, be super mobile, and so on. Hunters are the high-damage, very mobile sort of class that have the best mobility and the most options when it comes to attacking (In terms of strategy rather than in terms of abilities). Each of these has sub-classes that change their abilities and grenades, and writing about them all would be at least a full post per class.

The biggest problems the game has come in the form of the continued support from the studio, Bungie. There have been a number of uproars in the player community already in regards to some the questionable decisions Bungie has been making, all of which is compounded by the fact that Bungie isn’t very good at communicating with its fan base. There was the XP debacle (XP was being weighed so that super grind-y players didn’t get too many of the loot boxes you get by leveling up or by purchasing from Bungie), the only recently resolved issue involve the DLC (players without the DLC got locked out of almost every post-game activity that was a part of the weekly reward system), and the tumultuous Prometheus Lens arrival and subsequent nerf (PvP used nothing but this gun because it could nearly insta-kill other players and a large segment of people wanted to keep it around. Personally, I hated it since it made every PvP match the same boring grind of who pulls the trigger first). In the last couple weeks, Bungie has really started communicating more clearly and openly about what’s going on, but a lot of players are still left wondering just how all of this stuff made it through testing or why Bungie made some of their clearly dumb decisions they’ve subsequently backtracked on.

I can’t really hold the game accountable for the mistakes of the company that made it, though, so I would definitely recommend getting Destiny 2 (and its DLC because the extra missions they’ve added in Curse of Osiris were a lot of fun).  I’d recommend playing casually or settling yourself in for the cycle of frustration and excitement my roommate seems to go through every week or two, but that’s really up to you. If you’ve got an open evening every week that you’d like to fill and a group of friends you like to game with, I strongly suggest filling it with Destiny 2. You’ll have a lot of fun, if nothing else.